The cavern was dark.
The silence was the loudest thing I'd ever heard.
It pressed in, heavier than the whispers ever had. The air, stripped of that sickly sweet, metallic tang, just smelled like wet rock and old dust. It felt thin. Empty.
My ears rang. My whole body felt like one giant, throbbing bruise. I was on my hands and knees, the stone floor biting into my skin.
"Elias?" My voice was a croak.
A groan from a few feet away. "Here." The beam of his lantern cut through the black, shaky and weak. It found me, blinding me for a second, then moved away.
He was leaning against the wall, clutching the ancient book. His face was streaked with dirt and blood from his nose. His hands were trembling so hard he could barely hold the light steady.
"Did we...?" I couldn't finish.
"It's gone," he said, his voice hollow. He sounded as drained as I felt. He pushed himself off the wall, stumbling. "The Core is dead."
I looked over. The massive crystal was just a rock. A big, dull, black rock, cracked and lifeless. The green glow was gone. The mist of faces, Maya... all gone.
"Are they... free?" I asked.
Elias just shook his head. "I don't know, Kaito. I don't know if 'free' is the right word. They're... released. The energy is dispersed. The machine is broken."
He wasn't celebrating. There was no relief in his voice. Just exhaustion.
It hit me then. This wasn't a victory. We hadn't saved Maya. We had just... stopped the screaming. She was still gone. They were all still gone.
"The guardian," I whispered, looking at the spot where the monster had collapsed.
"Dissolved," Elias said. "It was just a construct. A projection of the Core's will. No will, no monster."
He coughed, a dry, racking sound. "We have to go. We have to go right now."
That snapped me out of it. The adrenaline was gone, and pure, cold fear was rushing in to fill the vacuum. The Core was broken. The power was out.
Which meant someone was going to come check the fuse box.
"Blackwood," I said.
"And everyone else," Elias agreed. "They'll know. They'll feel it. The influence... it's gone. The whole school. They'll know exactly what happened. And they'll know someone was responsible."
He grabbed my arm, hauling me to my feet. My legs felt like jelly. "The way we came. The tunnel. Move."
We didn't run. We half-walked, half-stumbled back toward the maintenance tunnel. Every step was agony. The cavern felt massive and empty, a tomb we'd just desecrated.
I kept looking back at the dead Core. I felt... nothing. Just empty. I thought I'd feel triumphant, or righteous. I just felt sick.
We reached the low archway and scrambled back into the claustrophobic darkness of the shaft. This time, the crawl was worse. Without the adrenaline, I felt every sharp edge, every loose rock. My knees were raw.
And the silence. It was unbearable. No whispers. No psychic pressure. Just the sound of our own ragged breathing, the scrape of our clothes on the stone. It was so loud, I was sure anyone in the school could hear us.
"Are you okay?" I whispered to Elias, who was crawling ahead of me.
"No," he panted. "Are you?"
"No."
We didn't talk again for a long time.
It felt like hours before we finally tumbled back out into the boiler room. The rusted giants were just machines again. The shadows were just shadows. The oppressive, watching feeling was gone.
The room was just a cold, damp basement.
We stood there for a moment, catching our breath, listening. The only sound was a distant drip... drip... drip... of water.
"Okay," Elias breathed, flicking off his lantern. The darkness was absolute. "We can't use the light. Not here. They might have monitoring systems. Physical ones."
He grabbed my hand. His was cold and clammy. "Follow me. Stay low. And don't make a sound. We're not going back to the dorms. Ever."
"Where... where are we going?"
"A place I set up. A 'dead zone.' Just in case."
He led me through the maze of boilers. I trusted him, followed his pull. My mind was catching up, and the panic was starting to set in properly.
We'd broken their-their... everything. Their mind-control factory. Their soul-engine. They weren't just going to expel us. They were going to make us disappear. Like Maya. But this time, there'd be no note. No questions.
We reached the vent we'd first come through. It seemed like a lifetime ago. Elias paused, listening.
Silence.
"This is the worst part," he whispered, his voice trembling. "Out in the open."
He pushed me up. "Go. Quickly."
I scrambled back into the shaft, pushing the vent cover open on the other side. I tumbled out into the dusty, abandoned classroom. It was still dark, still cold.
Elias was right behind me. He gently eased the vent cover back into place.
We stood in the darkness, listening. My heart was a drum against my ribs. I could hear the rain, still drumming against the boarded-up windows. A sound so normal, it felt insane.
"Now what?" I whispered.
Elias didn't answer. He crept to the door and pressed his ear against it.
I waited. The seconds stretched. I started shaking again, a deep, uncontrollable shudder. The cold. The fear. The crash.
"Clear," he finally said.
He opened the door a crack. The hallway outside was dim, lit only by the faint, ambient light of the rainy night filtering through the high windows. It was empty.
"My room... my stuff..." I started to say.
"Forget it, Kaito," Elias snapped, his voice sharp. "That room is the first place they'll look. Your notebook, your sketches... it's all evidence against you now. It's gone. Consider yourself a ghost."
A ghost. Like Maya. The thought made my stomach clench.
We slipped out into the hall. We moved like shadows, Elias in the lead. We used forgotten corridors, service stairs, routes I never knew existed. The school was a labyrinth, but it was his labyrinth.
The strangest part? The school felt normal.
Without the Core's psychic hum, it was just... an old building. The symbols on the walls were just carvings. The portraits were just paintings. The cold spots were just drafts.
All that terror, all that suffocating dread... it had been manufactured.
We rounded a corner, and Elias shoved me hard against the wall, into a recessed doorway. He pressed his body against mine, his hand over my mouth.
Footsteps.
Heavy, rhythmic, confident. Clack. Clack. Clack. On the stone floor.
I held my breath. My chest ached.
Headmaster Blackwood.
He walked past our hiding spot, not ten feet away. He wasn't running. He wasn't panicked. He was just... walking. His tall, imposing silhouette passed through a patch of moonlight. He was heading in the direction of the boiler room.
He didn't look left or right. He just walked. He knew.
He disappeared around the far corner.
I sagged against the wall, my legs giving out. Elias held me up.
"He knows," I choked out.
"He's going to check," Elias whispered, his voice grim. "He's not alarmed. He's... angry. We have about ten minutes before he sounds every alarm in this place. We have to be gone."
He pulled me. We ran.
We didn't stop until we reached a part of the school I didn't recognize. The old attics, above the library. It was a forest of dusty, forgotten furniture covered in white sheets.
Elias went to a blank section of wall, covered in peeling wallpaper. He knocked, a specific rhythm. Tap. Tap-tap. Tap.
A section of the wall clicked, and a narrow, dark opening appeared. A hidden door.
"In," he urged.
I crawled in. He followed, pulling the door shut behind us. It sealed with a quiet thud, plunging us into total darkness.
I heard him fumbling, then a small battery-powered lamp clicked on, flooding the space with a weak, yellow light.
It wasn't a room. It was a space between rooms. A long, narrow crawlspace, maybe five feet high, filled with pipes and old wiring.
But Elias had made it a home.
There was a sleeping bag in one corner, a small camping stove, stacks of books, maps of the school pinned to the support beams, and boxes of dried food.
This was his real room. His sanctuary.
Elias collapsed onto the sleeping bag, his head in his hands. The book slid from his lap. He was shaking, just like me.
"We're safe. For now," he mumbled. "They don't know about this place. No one does."
I slid down the wall, my back scraping against the rough wood. I couldn't stop trembling.
"What did we do, Elias?" I asked, the reality of it all crashing down. "We... we broke it. We broke their entire school. They're going to kill us."
He looked up, his grey eyes, usually so sharp and intelligent, were just wide and terrified. He was a kid. Just like me.
"Yeah," he said, his voice small. "I know."
We sat in silence. The only sound was the rain, distant, and our own panicked breathing. We'd faced the supernatural, the psychic terror, the monster. And we'd won.
Now, we had to face the men.
Suddenly, a new sound cut through the night. Faint, but unmistakable.
Clang. Clang. Clang.
The great bell in the school's main tower.
It wasn't ringing for class. It was an alarm. A deep, resonant, frantic sound, tolling over and over in the dead of night.
Elias and I locked eyes, the same cold, horrifying realization dawning on us both.
"He's back," I whispered.
"The hunt is on." Elias replied.